Tag: fiction

Things I Must Have

Things I Must Have ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Mrs. Koenig lay near death. Her four grown children had taken it upon themselves to gather in her house to discuss the disposition of her personal belongings.

“I want the Tiffany lamp,” Gwendolyn said.

“I already said the Tiffany lamp is mine!” Cupcake said.

“I’ve loved that lamp since I was a baby!”

“So? It’s still mine!”

“I want the dining room table and chairs,” Kent said. “Mother said I could have them.”

“Not so fast!” Gwendolyn said. “She said I could have them.”

“When did she say that?”

“I don’t know. Last Christmas, I think.”

“Well, she just told me last month that I could have them, so I guess that cancels you out.”

“I get the antique bed and dresser that were grandma’s,” Cupcake said. “Mother told me when I was fifteen that she wanted me to have them.”

“Well, isn’t that funny, Miss Cupcake!” Gwendolyn said. “I always thought I would get the antique bed and dresser.”

“I want the complete set of Dickens and the set of Britannica,” Kent said.

“You can have them!” Gwendolyn said. “Nobody cares about books.”

“I care. The Dickens set is over a hundred years old. It’s valuable. I’m going to sell it and buy a car I’ve been wanting.”

“Why don’t you keep the Dickens books and pass them on to your children, chowderhead?”

“I don’t have any children. Remember?”

“Oh, that’s right! There’s something funny about you, isn’t there?”

“There’s something even funnier about you!”

“I get the set of antique china,” Cupcake said, “and I’m not going to sell it, either.”

“What are you going to do with it, dear?” Gwendolyn asked.

“I’m going to keep it. What do you think? I also want the china cabinet. What good is the china without the cabinet?”

“I want the rolltop desk,” Cupcake said. “Mother told me in high school when I made the honor roll that I could have it.”

“I think the rolltop desk should go to me!” Kent said.

“And why is that?” Cupcake asked.

“It’s a man’s desk. I’m a man. Remember?”

“Oh, yes, darling! I keep forgetting!”

“I get the piano,” Gwendolyn said. “I’m the only one who plays.”

“You haven’t played since you were twelve years old,” Kent said, “and you were horrible! You used to cry when mother made you practice, and then she cried when she heard how bad your playing was.”

“Well, maybe I’ll take it up again. I always feel there’s something lacking in my life. Maybe it’s the piano.”

“Maybe it’s good judgment and common sense!” Cupcake said.

“Oh, and I also get the antique vase from China,” Gwendolyn said. “Mother’s piano wouldn’t be mother’s piano without the vase sitting on it.”

“Wait a minute!” Cupcake said. “I’m the only one here who knows antiques. I think I should get the antique vase from China.”

“I want mother’s photo albums and the big picture in the attic of grandma and grandpa,” Kent said. “Also the hall tree, the antique sideboard, the library table and the brocade sofa.”

“You can have them!” Gwendolyn said. “I never liked them, anyway.”

“Excuse me!” Cupcake said. “The library table is mine! I’ve already decided where I’m going to put it!”

“I’ll tell you where you can put it!” Kent said.

“I must have mother’s silver that she only used for special occasions,” Cupcake said. “The china is nothing without the silver to go with it.”

“I’m going to take the grandfather clock,” Kent said. “I’ve had my eye on it for  a long time. I’m sure mother wanted me to have it.”

“Then why didn’t she say so when she was in her right mind?”

“She did! She said it to me!”

“Don’t you think it’s funny she never told any of the rest of us?”

Dickie was the fourth and youngest child. He had not spoken until now. “You should hear yourselves!” he said. “Squabbling like a bunch of old hens over things! Mother’s not even dead yet! She may recover! She may come home from the hospital! She may live many more years!”

“We’re just trying to be prepared for when the time comes,” Kent said.

“These are the things we grew up with,” Gwendolyn said. “They’re meaningful to us. We want to make sure they end up in the right hands.”

“Meaning your hands,” Dickie said.

“Don’t you want to stake your claim to the things you want to keep” Cupcake asked. “To remember mother by?”

“No, I don’t want any of this stuff!”

“Why not?” Gwendolyn said.

“This stuff isn’t your stuff and it’s not my stuff!”

“What are you talking about?” Kent asked. “Of course it’s our stuff! Who else would it belong to?”

“I am in possession of some information that the rest of you sons-of-bitches don’t know!”

“What are you talking about?” Gwendolyn asked.

“Have you lost your mind?” Cupcake asked.

“No, I haven’t lost my mind. Mother’s lawyer called me yesterday. On the phone. Mother knew you would be fighting over her things, so she made a last-minute provision to her will. She wants everything in the house sold at auction and the money—all of it!—to go to charity.”

“What?” Cupcake said.

“I don’t think mother would do that!” Gwendolyn said.

“I don’t believe it!” Kent said. “You’re making this up out of spite!”

“And that’s not all!” Dickie said. “She donated the house to the church.”

“Church?” Cupcake said. “What church?”

“People from the church talked to her many times about giving them the house when she died. They finally broke her down and got her to sign an agreement.”

“This isn’t right!” Gwendolyn said. “Mother wasn’t right in the head! We can contest it! We can file a lawsuit! We can hold it up for years in the courts!”

“I don’t think so,” Dickie said. “It’s all legal and valid. If you don’t believe me, call mother’s lawyer. His name is Kenneth Ormiston.”

“Mother disinherited us!” Kent said, as if in a daze. “We don’t get anything!”

“Mother wouldn’t do that!” Cupcake said. “Not to me! I was always her favorite!”

“She won’t get away with this!” Gwendolyn said. “I’m going to have her buried face-down!”

“I don’t think it’ll make any difference to her,” Dickie said, “one way or another.”

“I don’t think I can walk!” Cupcake said, sobbing. “I need somebody to take me home!”

“Dickie,  you bastard!” Gwendolyn said. “Look what you did to your sister! I’m going to kill you!”

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Seven Seconds

Seven Seconds ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Angela McNeill traveled down by train to see Harry Vance and they spent that last Sunday together. They walked in the park, holding hands, and sat for a long time watching the swans gliding back and forth across the lake. It was a day in April and the weather could not have been finer.

He took her hand and said he wanted to marry her in June.

She avoided looking directly at him. “That doesn’t give me much time,” she said.

“Time to do what?” he asked.

“A wedding takes a lot of planning,” she said.

“It’s going to be a small wedding,” he said.

“Yes, but I want everything to be just right.”

It was a conversation they had had many times before. She was in “no hurry” to get married, while he couldn’t get it done fast enough. He was a college student and wanted to get the wedding out of the way in June, between semesters. Then, by the beginning of the fall semester, they would have found a place to live and would be “settled.” His parents were giving them a thousand dollars as a wedding gift to “get started” on.

“I don’t think your parents like me very much,” she said.

“Of course they like you! Why wouldn’t they?”

“They think I’m not right for you.”

“Nobody said any such thing! You’re just looking for complications that don’t exist.”

“I just want everything to be right, that’s all.”

“You’re thinking about your parents, aren’t you?” he said.

“No. Why should I?”

“You’re afraid you’ll have a bad marriage just because they did.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to say it. I know what you’re thinking.”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “Let’s not spoil the day.”

Angela hadn’t told Harry the whole truth about her mother. When Angela was little, her mother cast a pall over her family with her dark moods and sudden emotional shifts. In one evening or one afternoon, she would go from laughing and happy to raging and accusing. She’s just high-strung and emotional, Angela’s father used to say. She doesn’t mean anything by it.

Angela thought for years her mother was evil but then she found out the truth: she suffered from hereditary mental illness, passed down to her from her mother and grandmother. Feckless doctors gave her pills that were supposed to “calm her down,” but they only seemed to make her worse. When the pills didn’t provide the kick she wanted, she began supplementing them with whiskey. Soon she was an alcoholic in addition to being a drug abuser. She smoked countless cigarettes and had started at least two small fires in the house.

A divorce followed soon after. Angela and her brothers and sisters (nine all together) went with their father and moved to another city to make a fresh start. Angela’s mother, unable to take care of herself, went to live with her sister, who ran a kind of boarding house.

Angela was certain she was following in her mother’s footsteps. She would not escape the mental illness. She felt it, like a cancer inside her, that would one day consume her: the black moods, the despair, the hopelessness, the days when she couldn’t get out of bed. Could she marry Harry Vance and let him find out too late what she was going on inside her? The answer was no. She wasn’t going to inflict such pain on Harry or any children they might have.

That last Sunday evening they had a lavish, candlelit dinner together, paid for by money that Harry’s father gave him. When they were finished eating, it was almost time for Angela’s train.

“You can spend the night if you want to,” Harry said.

“I have a job to go to in the morning, dear,” she said. “I have to get up early.”

“When we’re married, you’re going to quit that job.”

“And what will we do for money until you graduate and get a job?”

“I don’t know. I can always rob a bank, I guess.”

“I don’t think that’s a very practical idea.”

He got her to the station just in time. She boarded her train and waved to him from the window. It was the last time they would ever see each other.

The next morning she arose at the usual time and ate a light breakfast. She dressed herself with care, making sure everything was exactly right. Before she was ready to go, she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote out a quick note. She didn’t even have to think before she wrote because she had thought it all out beforehand.

When it was time to leave for work, she put the note in her purse, put on her new spring jacket, slipped on her shoes and left her apartment. She didn’t go to her job, though, and didn’t bother to call to say she wasn’t coming.

She took a cab to the tallest building in the city, about twelve blocks from where she lived. She tipped the driver generously and he helped her out of the car and wished her a good day.

As usual, there were lots of people everywhere. Always a busy city. She took the crowded elevator to the eighty-sixth floor. She had been there before and knew there was an observation deck on that floor.

The people on the observation deck were so enthralled by the exhilarating view at more than eight hundred feet (it was like looking down from the top of a mountain) that nobody looked at her.

After standing at the rail for a few minutes, looking down, she took off her coat, folded it neatly and placed it over the rail, putting her purse on the floor underneath the coat. She then swung her legs over the rail, first the left and then the right, until she was sitting on the rail. Before anybody had a chance to see what she was doing and try to stop her, she let go of the railing and leaned forward slightly. Gravity did the rest.

She landed, feet first, on the roof of a parked limousine. Hardly anybody saw it. It happened so fast. Somebody called for an ambulance. In a minute or two, a couple hundred people knew that something had happened and wanted to see what it was.

A student photographer happened to be nearby with his camera. Approximately four minutes after Angela died, the student photographer took her picture. Instead of a grisly, horrifying scene of a smashed body, the picture was of a young woman with her shoes off, her stockings down around her ankles, her clothing barely disarranged. The expression on her face was one of peace and composure. The picture, when printed in the newspaper, bore the caption: The Most Beautiful Suicide.

In her purse was the note she had written right before leaving her apartment: I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation? I beg of you and my family—don’t have any service for me or remembrance for me. My fiancé asked me to marry him in June. I don’t think I would make a good wife for anybody. He is much better off without me. Tell my father I have too many of my mother’s tendencies.

Harry Vance saw no hint (he told everybody), not the slightest suggestion, in all the time he spent with her on Sunday, that she was contemplating such a move. If he had known, he would never have let her out of his sight. She was the one he wanted to marry, the only one. There would be nobody else. Sixty years later, when he went to his grave, it was as a single man.

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

It’s You I Adore

It’s You I Adore ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(I posted a different version of  this story previously.) 

Roland Finney is a mystery. He is forty-two years old and lives with his mother. He’s quiet and unassuming, keeps to himself, mows his lawn, picks up his morning newspaper, shovels the snow after a storm, never speaks to anybody. At seven-thirty every morning he leaves quietly for work and gets home at four in the afternoon and hardly ever goes out again. Nobody knows where he works or what kind of a job he has. On weekends he takes his mother on errands.

Carmen Giles lives next door to Roland Finney. She also lives with her mother. She is nearing forty years old, has been married and divorced two times. After the second divorce, she moved “back home,” as the saying goes, “to get her life in order.” She and her mother get along fine together as long as they avoid discussion of certain topics, such as Carmen’s choice of boyfriends.

Over a period of a year or more, Carmen Giles has developed an unhealthy interest in Roland Finney, amounting almost to obsession. It maddens her that he is single, she is single, they seem compatible in every appreciable way, and their paths never cross.

She watches him out the upstairs window with her binoculars as he cuts the grass in his back yard. He wears a sleeveless undershirt, khaki pants and tennis shoes. She likes the play of his biceps as he pushes and then pulls the mower. On his face is a look of concentration. She likes the neat, straight rows of his cutting. A man who cuts that precisely and evenly must have a lot of good qualities. He would hang up his own clothes and rinse his own dishes and not leave it for somebody else.

He shuts off the mower and sits in a lawn chair and picks up a newspaper and opens it. He is a man who likes to read and wants to know what’s going on in his world. He’s not the kind who would lay on the couch in front of the TV all the time. His mother comes out of the house and brings him a bottle of beer. She is a troll-like woman with stooped shoulders and hair dyed an awful red that hangs down to her shoulders. He takes a drink of the beer and holds the bottle between his thighs so his hands are free to turn the pages of the paper.

In the year-and-a-half that Carmen has lived next door to Roland Finney, she has never heard him utter a single syllable. He is possibly the quietest, most maddening man she has ever encountered. She has thought on occasion that she will go over and introduce herself, begin a friendly conversation with him, but somehow she just doesn’t have the nerve. Maybe he doesn’t speak, or maybe there’s something wrong with him, like mental retardation, and she would only embarrass him and herself, too.

When a letter is misdelivered to her mailbox, a letter that belongs to him, she sees it as her chance to engage him in conversation. She takes the letter and knocks on his door assertively, but he doesn’t answer—nobody answers, not even his troll-like mother—so she drops it through the mail slot in the door and leaves. She is certain he is at home since his car in the driveway and believes he might have come to the door if he had wanted to.

At night she lies in her upstairs bedroom and thinks about him and imagines him lying in his own bed in the room just across the yard from hers behind the heavily curtained window. When his light is off, she’s sure he must be asleep. He’s the type who would wear pajamas. His mother would take them out of the clothes dryer and fold them neatly and put them in his dresser drawer for him. He’d wear them for a few nights and then take them off and put them in the laundry and get out a clean pair.

One Saturday night she is watching TV with her mother when she hears a car stop out front and the honk of a horn. She goes to the front window and pulls back the curtain a little and peeks out. The idling car is stopped at the curb in front of Roland’s house, taillights gleaming in the darkness. The horn honks again and in a minute Roland comes running out of his house and gets into the car and it speeds off.

Where is he going on a Saturday night and who is he going with? With this question burning in her mind, she can no longer concentrate on the TV programs. Here she sits with her mother, while she should be the one going out having a good time on Saturday night. She feels lonely and left out, maybe even a little jealous.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” her mother asks.

“I feel all right,” Carmen says. “It must be something I ate.”

“Want an Alka-Seltzer?”

“No, I’m going to bed.”

“Don’t you want to watch the late movie? It’s Joan Crawford.”

“Joan Crawford gives me nightmares.”

Lying in her bed in the dark, she realizes she is in love with Roland Finney, or close to it. That’s why she feels so unhappy and jealous to know he left in a car with somebody else on Saturday night. Yes, she loves him. There can be no other explanation. Absolutely she loves him, in a way she’s never loved before. She knows deep down that he would love her too if only he was given the chance.

The next morning is Sunday. She sleeps late and when she wakes up she begins drinking vodka martinis instead of eating breakfast. While she’s enjoying the lightheaded feeling alcohol always gives her, she goes into the kitchen and begins making oatmeal raisin cookies. She prepares the batter and, while the cookies are in the oven, she washes her face, puts on clean clothes and makeup to make herself look better than she feels.

When the cookies are done baking and have cooled long enough, she puts three dozen in a tin box in a nest of wax paper and closes the lid. After a couple more quick drinks, she makes her drunken way out the door with the tin of cookies and goes over to Roland’s house and knocks on his door.

She is certain Roland will answer the door this time but, no, it’s the woman. She scowls at Carmen as if she’s an annoying vacuum cleaner salesman. The corners of her mouth turn down.

“Yes?” she says.

Carmen smiles but her mouth is suddenly dry. “Good morning! My name is Carmen. I’m your next door neighbor.”

“Yes?”

“I know we’ve never been properly introduced, but I just wanted to…”

“Are you selling something?”

“Why, no.”

“What’s that you got there?”

“It’s some cookies I baked. Oatmeal raisin. I baked more than my mother and I can possibly eat, so I thought you and your son might like to have some of them.”

“My son? What are you talking about?”

“Is he here?”

“Is who here?”

“I’d like to give them to him myself.”

“Who is it?” she hears his voice call from another room. The first words she ever hears him speak.

Carmen pushes past the woman and enters the house uninvited.

“Wait a minute!” the woman says. “You can’t just come barging…”

“Who is it?” Roland calls again.

She follows the sound of his voice into the kitchen. He’s sitting at the table with a newspaper spread out before him. When he stands up, she sees he’s wearing a bathrobe. His legs are bare.

“What?” he says, and that one word is all he can say because she surprises him by running to him and holding him in a tight embrace around the shoulders. Dropping the tin of cookies to the floor, she tries to kiss him on the lips but he deflects it by stepping back.

He takes hold of her arms to try to free himself. “I think you have the wrong house!” he says. “I don’t know you!”

“I’ve wanted to meet you for the longest time!” she sobs.

“What? Who are you, anyway?”

“Oh, I’m sorry! My name is Carmen Giles. I’m your next door neighbor. I see you every day. I watch you out the upstairs window with my binoculars.”

“I think you have the wrong person.” He pushes Carmen gently aside and goes out of the room.

The woman is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, looking at her, wondering what’s she’s going to do next.

“That’s about it, girly!” she says. “We don’t know you and from what I’ve seen we don’t want to know you.”

“Oh, dear!” Carmen says. “I’ve made a terrible mistake, haven’t I? I’ve been drinking vodka martinis all day and I’m not myself. I don’t ordinarily act like this. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Just go.”

“I’d like to apologize to your son.”

“What are you talking about? My son?”

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed him.”

“My son? You think he’s my son?”

“Well, isn’t he?”

She starts to say something else, but the words won’t come. She bends over and vomits vodka martinis all the floor. When she is finished, she stands up and wipes her mouth on her sleeve. The woman, the wife, takes her by the arm, escorts her to the door and ejects her with a little shove.

The next day, once again sober, she tells her mother about meeting the Finneys.

“I was feeling generous and a little sentimental, I guess, and I wanted some company. I baked more cookies than I wanted. I put some of them in one of those tins from Christmas and I took it over to give to them. Just a friendly gesture and so innocent! After living next door to them all this time, I wanted to meet them. In all innocence, I swear! When I knocked on the door, that horrible woman answered. She’s even worse-looking up-close than she is from a distance. She invited me into the kitchen for a cup of coffee. He was sitting at the kitchen table practically naked.  He stood up and smiled at me. Then he wanted to give me a big hug. I don’t object to an innocent hug, but I could see right away that he was putting more oomph into it than was necessary. He actually groped my backside with both hands until I squirmed loose. I was plenty embarrassed, but I tried to laugh it off. I handed him the tin of cookies and I said, ‘I have all these home-baked cookies, more than I will ever eat, and I thought you and your mother would like some.’ At that, they both started laughing, a sickening, cackling laugh! They were laughing at me! I felt humiliated! Then the old woman said, ‘You think he’s my son, you silly goose? He’s not my son! He’s my husband! I’m his wife! Hah-hah-hah!’ Then the man said, ‘Just because I’m married doesn’t mean I can’t have some fun!’ Then he leered at me suggestively and laughed. Well, I got out of there as fast as I could and came home. They are thoroughly distasteful people and when I see them again I’m going to pretend they’re not even there!”

“That reminds me of something I heard in the beauty shop,” her mother says. “Do you remember Arlene Trussell? I knew her all the way back in high school. Her name was Arlene Archer then. She married Benny Trussell. He had a face like a bulldog. I never could see what she saw in him, but I think she had a bun in the oven, so I suppose it was a case of marrying him or giving birth to a bastard child. Anyway, to make a long story short…”

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The World That Comes After

The World That Comes After ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Katherine Isabel Burkhardt was born in 1898 and died of a summer fever in 1912 at the age of fourteen. When she found herself in the family vault, she was more afraid than she had ever been in her life. She didn’t know where she was or why.

“Hello!” she called. “Is anybody there? Hello! Mother! Father! Are you there? Do you see me? Can you figure out how to get me out of here? I don’t like it here! It’s spooky and I think I’m going to cry! I think there’s been some mistake! I don’t think I ought to be here!”

She was on the point of screaming when she saw an old woman standing over her. She didn’t know the old woman but was so relieved she wasn’t alone that it didn’t matter.

The words came out in a torrent: “Who are you? What is this place? Can you tell me where I am? I need to go home! My mother and father will be worried about me if I don’t come home for dinner!”

“Not so fast!” the old woman said. “All your questions will be answered, but only one at a time.”

“I don’t know where I am. I don’t like it here! I don’t remember how I…”

She stopped in the middle of a sentence because she saw, not having noticed before in her excitement, that the old woman had a mellow glow emanating from her chest.

“What is that?” she asked. “I’ve never seen anything like it! You’re glowing!”

“Of course I’m glowing,” the old woman said. “We’re all glowing. You’re glowing too.”

“What?”

When she looked down, she was delighted for a moment by her own glow coming from inside her.

“What is this?” she asked. “What does this mean?”

“It’s very simple,” the old woman said. “You’ve crossed over.”

“Crossed over where?”

“You’ve passed from the world of the living to the world that comes after.”

“The world that comes after? Are you telling me I’m dead?”

“Yes. You must accept it. Embrace it.”

“But I don’t want to be dead! I have things to do. I promised mother I’d clean out my closet. I have my schoolwork to do. I have my cats to take care of. I’m going to a church picnic on Saturday.”

“The picnic will go on without you. That’s what happens when we die. The world keeps right on spinning.”

“I don’t believe you. I think I’m just having a bad dream. In a little while I’ll wake up and everything will be fine.”

“It’s a dream, all right, but not the kind of dream you wake up from.”

“Who are you anyway?”

“I’m your grandmother. You never knew me because I crossed over before you were born.”

“Just what is this place? Where am I?”

“You’re in the family vault. In the cemetery.”

“I remember! I remember the family vault! Father showed it to us on one of our Sunday drives. It looks like a little church with spires.”

“That’s right. Your great-grandfather, my father, was a wealthy man and he had the vault built at great expense so all of us would have a place to go when we die.”

“That was very thoughtful of him, I’m sure. Now, can you tell me how to get out of here so I can go home?”

The old woman laughed. “You can’t get out. This is where you belong now. With us.”

“There are others?”

“Of course, there are others. You’ll meet them all soon.”

Katherine began to cry real tears, as opposed to tears for effect. “I didn’t get a chance to tell anybody goodbye because I didn’t know I was going to die! Mother and father and Boyd, my brother. My cats.”

“They knew what was happening. They were in the room. They all said goodbye to you, even though you didn’t know it.”

“Will I see them all again someday?”

“It doesn’t hurt to hope.”

“I’m worried about my cats. They’ll starve if I’m not there to feed them.”

“Don’t you think your brother will take care of them now?”

“Yes, I suppose he will. He was always quite fond of animals.”

“All your worldly cares are over. You are at peace. Peace like a river.”

“I’m feeling so sleepy now, as if I can barely hold up my head.”

“That’s right. Time to sleep. And when you wake up you’ll meet the others.”

A curtain descended as at the end of an act in a play, and Katherine knew nothing again until she was being led by the hand to meet the rest of the family.

She felt shy at being brought before a gallery of strangers. She was not at all  surprised, however, to see that they all carried the mysterious and arresting glow inside them, the same glow that she now had.

Cousins Parry and Lomax, twins, were ten at the time they crossed over. (They went over a roaring waterfall in a rowboat on a flawless June day and drowned.) They looked at Katherine with wide-eyed wonder; each of them gave her a quick, unsmiling bow from the waist and then they were gone.

Great-grandfather was tall and broad, wearing his fancy dress suit and sporting the elaborate mustache and side whiskers for which he was known. He was a successful businessman, the millionaire who financed the family vault. On meeting Katherine, he tilted his head back and looked at her as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes.

“I don’t think we’ve met, my dear,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m dead, thank you, sir,” she said. “How are you?”

Uncle Evan, great-grandfather’s son, was handsome in his military uniform. He was only twenty-five when he crossed over during the Spanish-American War. He shook Katherine’s hand politely, gave her a grim smile, and receded into the background as his military training dictated.

Aunt Ida was a sad-faced woman carrying a baby. The baby, Augustus, crossed over at the age of three months when Aunt Ida was only in her twenties. Now that she had him with her again, Aunt Ida vowed that she and Augustus would never be separated again.

A formidable woman was Aunt Zel, great-grandfather’s sister. She had an elaborate coiffure piled high on her head and a stunning array of jewelry gracing her person. By her side always was her diminutive husband, Uncle Ivor; he was a hundred-and-twenty pounds when he was alive and eight inches shorter than Aunt Zel. He had lost his right arm, not on the field of battle, but to a rabid skunk when he was eight years old.

“I’m so happy to make your acquaintance, my dear,” aunt Zel said to Katherine. “I just know we’re going to be great friends.”

Uncle Ivor took Katherine’s hand in his and bent over and kissed it until Aunt Zel turned and gave him a warning look.

Uncle Jordan wore a dress suit with a diamond stickpin and silk cravat. He kissed Katherine on each cheek and then he was gone as if he had a pressing engagement elsewhere. The truth was that he avoided being around the other family members for long because none of them approved of him. In life, he had enjoyed himself a little too much, spent money freely that didn’t belong to him and died, deeply in debt, in young middle age of alcoholism.

Cousin Talbot’s appendix burst when he was thirty-two. Immediately after he crossed over, his beautiful young wife, Magdalene, married a man she hardly knew by the name of Milt Clausen. Magdalene did not honor Talbot’s memory in her widowhood. She was not in the family crypt and never would be. Cousin Talbot didn’t want her anywhere near him. He had renounced women and marriage for all eternity.

“If you were a boy instead of a girl, I’d advise you never to get married,” Cousin Talbot said to Katherine.

“I don’t think my gender makes much difference now,” Katherine said.

Cousin Emory was sixteen when he crossed over as the result of a crushed larynx sustained in an impromptu game of tackle football with some of his friends. The glow in his chest was a little brighter than anybody else’s and, indeed, extended upwards to his neck, face and head. His smile was infectious and he seemed all the time to be on the verge of laughter. When he touched Katherine’s hand, she felt he was a kindred spirit.

“How do you like being a ghost?” he asked her.

She shook her head and blushed, not knowing what to say.

“It was the same for me when I first came here,” he said. “I didn’t know why God would have me die so young. We learn not to ask why but just to accept things as they are.”

“I don’t like it here and I want to go home,” she said but she wasn’t sure if Cousin Emory heard her.

Before moving on, he leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I can show you around if you like. There’s a lot more than just this.” He held out his arms to take in the whole family crypt.

“If you find you have the time,” she said, “I think that would be lovely.”

There were others after Cousin Emory, but the truth was they blended together in a blur and Katherine couldn’t remember them after she met them.

The next time Katherine saw Cousin Emory, he showed her, much to her delight, that she could leave the family crypt at will (hers and not anybody else’s). All she had to do was press her body against the outer wall. Since the wall was solid and she was not, she could pass through it. He tried to explain the laws of physics involved, but she didn’t understand what he was talking about.

The cemetery was much larger than Katherine imagined. Cousin Emory took her to visit some of his spirit friends: a tall, criminally handsome policeman with a handlebar mustache who loved to tell stories about apprehending cutthroat desperadoes; a Civil War soldier who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln and spent ten minutes engaged in conversation with him; a victim of the Johnstown Flood (“the water came roaring down the mountain and swept away everything in its path”); a governor of the state who once had presidential aspirations; a group of twenty girls who died in an orphanage fire, all occupying the same grave; a twelve-year-old boy named Jesse who stood just outside his massive vault until another spirit came along and engaged him in conversation.

On one of their forays outside the crypt, they came upon a funeral on a hillside that resembled, with all the attendees dressed in black, an aggregation of crows.

“This is the fun part,” Emory said.

He walked among the mourners, pretending to kiss or touch or put his arm around certain of them. He also demonstrated the technique of coming up quickly behind them and making the more sensitive of them turn around to see who—or what—was there.

“They sense I’m there but when they turn around they’re not so sure.”

He made her laugh when he floated over a couple of old ladies in large feathered hats and, assuming a reclining position over them, pretended to pat them on the sides of their heads.

“I, for one, love being a ghost!” he said.

“Can I fly, too?” Katherine asked.

“We don’t really fly like a duck going south for the winter. What we do is float. We float because we’re lighter than air.”

“Can I try it?” Katherine asked.

“You can do anything you want, now,” he said.

He demonstrated his floating technique and they spent the afternoon floating all over the cemetery.

“Maybe there are some good things about being a spirit,” Katherine said.

“Of course there are!”

“No more head colds, sore throats or stomach cramps. No more trips to the doctor or dentist. No more nightmares or math quizzes. No more being made to play badminton with my little cousins. No more boring church sermons that make everybody cranky, and no more liver and onions for dinner ever again!”

Cousin Emory laughed, but then Katherine started thinking about all the good things she had left behind, such as her cats and her beautiful room at home and her mother and father and brother and all her friends, and she started to cry.

“I think it’s time to go back,” Cousin Emory said.

Katherine began venturing outside the family crypt often, either with Cousin Emory or on her own. And then, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in October, she happened to be in the right place at the right time and she saw them.

She recognized father’s automobile and then she saw that all three of them were riding inside: father, mother and her brother Boyd. She floated after the car—it wasn’t going very fast—and attached herself to the back of it as it turned out of the cemetery and headed toward home.

She held on easily enough until father pulled into the driveway of the old house. She was happy to see that everything looked exactly the same. The first thing she did was to go around back and check on her kittens. They were all there and seemed healthy and happy, but they were now adult cats. She cried when they meowed and purred and recognized her and begged to be picked up.

Her room upstairs was the same. Everything was just as she left it, the books and pencils on her desk, the dolls and stuffed animals on the bed and the chair, the pictures on the wall, the lamp, the rocking chair, the clothes hanging in the closet. Mother hadn’t changed a thing.

She was home again! With her family! Of course, her physical self—her body—was back at the family crypt in the cemetery, but the most important part of her was here—in her childhood home that she loved and never wanted to leave.

She would stay with her family always. She floated over the dining room table as had their dinner. She floated over their beds at night when they were sleeping. Sometimes she went up behind them and gently blew air on the backs of their necks. At those times, they seemed to know she was there because they smiled and sometimes they turned all the way around.

When they were all away for the day, she would go from room to room, touching the beloved objects: the piano where she learned to play, the horsehair sofa that was so comfortable for a nap, the dishes in the China closet, the books on the shelves, the worn rug on the floor, the ferns and philodendrons. All the things that made home what it was.

She spent time every day with her cats. She watched them as they grew up and had their own babies. Some of them left and ventured out into the world on their own, as cats will do. She watched as they grew old and cried whenever any of them became sick and died.

The years went by but, since she was a spirit, there was no such thing as time. She remained the same, always fourteen years old, but her family changed, as families will. Boyd went through college and got a job in New York City and left home. He sent postcards and letters, saying how happy he was. Father became old and stooped; he had a heart attack and had to stop working and draw a pension. Mother’s hair turned gray and her shoulders were perpetually bowed. She still fixed three meals a day and worked always at keeping the house clean and running smoothly.

Katherine was standing beside father’s bed when he died on a January night. She believed that in the last minute of his life he saw her and knew she was there. He died happily.

Mother continued in the big, empty house on her own. Always busy, she was never one to give up. She continued to cook meals and clean a different part of the house every day, even though nothing was the same for her. In the evenings, she sat in the parlor alone and read, sewed, or knitted. Sometimes she would stand up and go to the piano and play a hymn or a popular song from her youth that she recalled. And always, Katherine was close by. She longed to reach out and fold mother in her arms and comfort her.

In the time that was no time, mother also died. The house was sold and all the furnishings moved out. A family with four children took up residence. They were noisy and quarrelsome. They went in and out all day long, slamming the doors every time. They had two large dogs that barked at the slightest provocation.

Katherine couldn’t stay in a house that was no longer hers. She didn’t like the family that moved in. They were nothing like her own family and had their own way of doing things. They removed mother’s drapes from the living room and dining room and replaced the wallpaper in Katherine’s room with a print with sailboats that she didn’t like.

There was nothing left for her to do but go but back to the family crypt. Her grandmother was right; it was where she belonged.

In living time, she had been away for decades, but to the other spirits in the family crypt, it was no time at all. They weren’t aware she had even been away.

She was sad when she went back to the crypt, but not sad for long. Mother and father were both there with their own glows. Why had she not thought of it before? Weren’t they part of the family? Didn’t it stand to reason that they would be in the family crypt the same as any other member of the family? She had just never thought of them as dead in the same way she was dead.

They were all on the same side of the Great Divide now between Life and Death. There would be no more leave-taking. One day Boyd would be joining them. His spot was waiting for him on father’s right side.

In the middle of Katherine’s joyous reunion with mother and father, she heard a small sound like mewing. It could only mean one thing. Yes, they were all there. Every cat she had ever owned in her life was waiting for her, no farther away than the length of her arm. Now, at last, heaven was upon her.

Copyright 2020 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

Prentiss Peckinpaugh Prefers Pornography

Prentiss Peckinpaugh Prefers Pornography ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Miss Sullivan belched quietly into her handkerchief; the hamburger steak with onions she had for lunch didn’t quite agree with her. With the handkerchief over her mouth, she looked out over the thirty-two lost souls in her care until five minutes to the hour. They were all fifteen years old and most of them she would happily strangle if she could. She had been in the teaching profession for too long and was overdue for retirement.

Since it was Friday afternoon and everybody was waiting to be unleashed and unfettered until Monday morning, this group of ninth graders was engaged in what was called silent reading. Everybody must know that silent reading was serious business. You couldn’t write or giggle or daydream or think about what you were going to do when you got home or work on your algebra problems (it wasn’t study hall) or pass notes or whisper or gaze out the window or thumb through a magazine. You had to read a “good book,” preferably one from the reading list or one that Miss Sullivan herself had approved. You had to put the fifty-five minutes to good use, reading every word on every page, and absorbing what you read as if you would be tested on it.

Halfway through the hour, Miss Sullivan launched a surprise attack, suddenly standing up from her desk and walking the aisles between the desks, down one aisle and up another. If anybody was doing anything they weren’t supposed to be doing—reading a comic book or concealing a paperback of some kind behind a library book—she would catch them before they had a chance to hide it.

Prentiss Peckinpaugh was an odd boy from an odd family. He lived on a farm with his family; he had many brothers and sisters. His clothes always looked too big for him as if they had belonged to somebody else before he wore them. He always kept the top button of his shirt done up, even in warm weather. He walked with a cautious, forward tilt as if he had something wrong with his back.

Prentiss was sitting in the row of chairs against the wall. Miss Sullivan came upon him from behind, from the left, and her eyes fell upon the book he was reading, a paperback with a pink cover.

“What is that you’re reading?” she asked.

He closed the book so she could see the front cover. The title of the book was The Passionate Orphan.

“Where did you get that book?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“May I see it?” she asked.

He handed her the book and she flipped through the pages and read several passages, standing there in the aisle between desks.

“You’re reading this book?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Prentiss said.

“It’s ‘yes, ma’am’.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How far along are you in the book?”

“Almost to the end.”

“Do you know what this book is about?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What is it about, then? Would you care to tell me?”

By now everybody in class had their attention focused on the conversation between Miss Sullivan and Prentiss Peckinpaugh.

“I don’t think I can say it,” Prentiss said.

“Don’t you know this book is not appropriate reading material for ninth grade English?”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Who gave you this book?”

“Nobody gave it to me. It’s my book.”

“You don’t know where it came from?”

“No.”

“Did you steal it?”

“Why would I steal it when it already belonged to me?”

“Did a grown man give it to you? Maybe a friend of your father’s?”

“No. I already said nobody gave it to me. It’s my book.”

“Do you know the meaning of the word ‘pornography’?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s what this book is. It’s pornography and if somebody in this school gave it to you, we need to know who it was. This is a book that certainly doesn’t belong in a school, in a classroom, where other people can see it. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

“How about if we go downstairs and show the book to Mr. Ball?”

“I have the feeling I don’t have a choice.” Prentiss Peckinpaugh said.

“Right you are,” Miss Sullivan said.

Miss Sullivan put the class in charge of Mavis Blaylock, a know-it-all, holier-than-thou toady who would stop at nothing to gain favor with the teacher and would take down names of those who misbehaved. Mavis smirked with superiority and took her place at teacher’s desk.

After an admonition to the class to continue their silent reading, Miss Sullivan escorted Prentiss Peckinpaugh down the three flights to the principal’s office.

Principal Ball was engaged on the phone, so Miss Sullivan and Prentiss had to wait for about five minutes until he was free. When at last they were ushered into the carpeted, wood-paneled office, Mr. Ball took one look at them, frowned and said, “What’s this?”

“Well, we’ve been having silent reading this hour,” Miss Sullivan said, “and I found this boy reading this book.”

She handed the book to Mr. Ball.

“Just what is this?” he asked.

“Well, as I was just saying to him…”

“What’s your name, boy?” Mr. Ball asked.

“Prentiss Peckinpaugh.”

“Say ‘sir’ when you’re speaking to me.”

“Prentiss Peckinpaugh, sir!”

“I was just saying to Prentiss here that this book doesn’t belong in school and should never see the light of day,” Miss Sullivan said.

Mr. Ball laid the book on the desk and turned over several pages, reading as he went.

“Who gave you this book, Mr. Peckinpaugh?” Mr. Ball asked.

“Nobody gave it to me. It’s my book.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It didn’t come from anywhere. It’s my book.”

“Don’t you know that a book like this is not allowed in school?”

“I don’t see anything wrong with it. Nobody sees it but me.”

“Do you have other books of this nature?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, we’ll let you off with a warning this time because you’re young and you didn’t know, but I want you to know that if you ever bring pornographic material into this school again, we will take disciplinary action that will include a three-day suspension. Now, do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you’re on your own free time at home, you can read whatever you want, but in a school like this with hundreds of other students, you must follow our guidelines for what is acceptable and what is not. Am I getting through to you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Take him to the library, to the fiction section, Miss Sullivan, and have him check out Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. That’s a good book and, more importantly, it’s an appropriate book.”

“I’ve read it,” Prentiss Peckinpaugh said.

“Well, read it again!”

“Are you going to give me back my book, sir, that you took from me?”

“No! I want to absorb it more thoroughly. I need to know what the students in this school are up to.”

The library’s one copy of Of Mice and Men was checked out, so Miss Sullivan suggested The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

“I’ve read it,” Prentiss Peckinpaugh said.

“Well, read it again! And after you’ve finished, I want a solid book report on it.”

“Okay.”

“That’s ‘yes, ma’am’.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

During study hall next hour, Prentiss Peckinpaugh went back to the library and checked out Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence. He wanted to choose for himself what books to read. He liked The Old Man and the Sea fine, but he didn’t want to read it again.

While reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he could easily hide it behind The Old Man and the Sea and nobody would ever know the difference.

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Ground My Bed, the Leaves My Blanket

The Ground My Bed, the Leaves My Blanket ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(I posted a different version of this story previously.)

The vast cemetery was many splendid acres of hills, trees, ponds, statues, winding roads, mausoleums, columbaria (for cremated remains), crypts, and walk-in burial chambers gouged out of the sides of the hills. For those inclined to notice, there was every shape, style (a century and a half of changing styles) and description of grave marker known to man, from no bigger than a shoebox to magnificent enough for a Roman emperor.

It was a sprawling city of some one-half million departed souls, but also home, on any night of the year, to dozens of indigents who didn’t have the price of a room or an acceptable flop and so found themselves with no other place to rest their weary (living) bones than among the unsuspecting dead.

Anybody who ever took up residence in the cemetery, if only for one night, knew it afforded many excellent and discreet hiding places where one might sleep, copulate, administer drugs, perform bodily functions, eat, bathe, think, drink, cry—or do any number of other things—away from the prying eyes of man.

As with every person in reduced circumstances who found himself or herself residing in the cemetery, Vicki-Vicki Novak had a story. After graduating from high school, she believed she had everything she needed to find herself a good job, so she left her rancorous mother and her unhappy home and spent six nausea-inducing hours on the bus and moved to the city. Life for her had always been hard, but it wasn’t until she came to the city that she discovered how cruel and unforgiving it is.

She would have taken any job she could find but the truth was there were no jobs of any kind to be had. She was turned away repeatedly because she had no experience of any kind. It didn’t matter that she was good at figures, was a stellar reader, and made better-than-average grades in school. She couldn’t get a job as a cafeteria worker because there were already seventy-five girls on the list ahead of her. She applied for a job in a laundry but was told she was too young and too slightly built to carry heavy loads. The sad truth was she didn’t make a good impression on those who might have hired her; she was too diffident and naïve; she knew too little of the world.

She spent her first two weeks in the city in an old hotel but, when she saw how fast her money was being used up, she took what little she had left and moved to a cheap boarding house where she slept in a tiny, box-like room and ate two small meals a day.

Finally even the boarding house was too expensive for her and she ended up living on the streets, where she met a coterie of other down-and-outers just like her. They gave her advice about how to survive and where she might get a bite to eat or a place to flop for the night. More than once she engaged in sexual congress with nefarious men in exchange for a small amount of cash, a package of cigarettes, an orange, or a couple of pills that were guaranteed to make her feel wonderful and forget all her troubles. She abhorred these couplings at first but after a time didn’t mind them so much because she disconnected herself from the proceedings and felt nothing.

Vicki-Vicki was fortunate in one respect because when she first began living on the streets of the city, it was May and the cruel and dreadful winter was past and wouldn’t be coming around again for a while. During a police crackdown on the street people, she sought refuge in the cemetery on the advice of a friend, one Chester Burnside, a man who might at one time have been a woman (one of those aberrations of nature all too abundant in the large city). The number-one piece of cemetery advice that veterans like Chester Burnside had to offer to newcomers like Vicki-Vicki was this: Don’t get caught because if you do you might get your brains knocked out or you might end up in jail. All the veterans had horror stories about people getting their brain matter literally knocked out of their heads onto the ground by leering, sadistic cemetery guards.

On a Friday afternoon in October, Vicki-Vicki was washing up at one of the cemetery’s fountains. She trailed her hands in the water and brought them to her face. The water was fresh and clean. She wished she might take off all her clothes and get down in the water naked and give herself a good scrubbing, but if she dared to do such a thing, somebody was sure to come along and see her, so she just contented herself with rinsing her arms and face.

Towering above the fountain was a seven-foot tall lady angel. Her wings were only marginally chipped and bird-splattered; she looked down with a benevolent and loving expression.

“What are you doing here?” the angel asked, bending her head in Vicki-Vicki’s direction.

“I was washing myself,” Vicki-Vicki said.

“You might drown yourself if you have any sense.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It’s October. Winter’s coming. Are you going to go home while you still can?”

“I don’t have a home.”

“Everybody has a home.”

“My mother said she’d kill me if she ever saw me again.”

“When did you last eat?”

“I don’t know. Yesterday, sometime, I think.”

“Life is hard, isn’t it?”

“My life is. I don’t know about anybody else’s.”

“You must do better.”

“Tell me how.”

Somebody was coming. They both heard the footsteps moving through the leaves at the same time. The angel went back to being mute and immobile, while Vicki-Vicki ran and hid behind the nearest large tree.

When she peered cautiously around the tree, she was relieved to see it was the old wino Eulah Knickerbocker and not a cemetery guard.

“Hey! You!” she said, stepping out into the open.

Eulah Knickerbocker jumped and only kept from screaming by placing her filthy hand over her mouth. “You shouldn’t scare people like that!” she said. “My nerves is shot all to hell!”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“I’m going around telling everybody I see. It’s lucky I found you. There’s going to be a purge tonight.”

“What’s a purge?”

“They’ve took on extra guards. They’re going to go through the cemetery and round up everybody who doesn’t belong. Some of us will end up dead.”

“Just hide,” Vicki-Vicki said. “That’s what I do.”

“No, dear! You won’t be able to hide from them this time. If you’re here, they’ll find you. You’d better get out before dark.”

“Where would I go?”

“How on earth should I know? Go back to the city.”

“But I came here to get away from the city!”

“I know! It’s terrible, ain’t it? But if they find you here tonight, it will go very bad for you. They might throw you in jail, and if they do you might never get out again.”

“They don’t scare me,” Vicki-Vicki said.

“Take it from somebody who’s been there, dearie. I’ve been living on the streets for seventeen years. I know how these things go.”

“You haven’t seen that fella they call Diego, have you?” Vicki-Vicki asked.

“If I did, I’d try to forget it.”

“He owes me money.”

“You’ll be lucky to get a nickel out of him, even if you do find him.”

“No, he’s been working, clearing brush. If I can catch him before he spends all his pay, I can get my money and have enough for a decent room for the night.”

“Say, you wouldn’t mind me coming along, would you, darling? Two can stay in a room for the same price as one.”

“Not this time, Eulah. I just need to be alone tonight.”

“Well, all right. I figure it don’t hurt to ask.”

“No, it don’t. Have you got anything to eat?”

“If I did I’d share it with you.”

“I know you would, Eulah.”

“Have you seen my twin sister, Beulah?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“She’s the great beauty of the family. Have I ever told you about her?”

“I believe so.”

“She’s coming to get me and take me home with her to live. I don’t know if it’ll be tonight but any day now.”

“I hope it all works out for you, Eulah.”

“It’s bound to, this time.”

The sun was going down and the air suddenly had the feel of late autumn. It would be about the time that normal people who live in houses would be sitting down to dinner. She needed to think about where she would spend the night in case she didn’t find Diego and get her money. The important thing was to find a snug little place out of the wind that hadn’t already been claimed by somebody else.

She went to the oldest part of the cemetery, the part she liked best and the part where she was mostly likely to see a ghost if there were any about. The trees were sheltering; the gravestones were large and close together. She began piling up dry leaves to make herself a bed in a secure little spot between stones when she heard someone coming. She started to hide but it was too late; she had already been spotted.

“Hey, there, little chicken!” a man’s voice said.

Right away she recognized the voice as that of Julius Orange. He was tall and rather handsome but his face and hands were crusted with dirt all the time as if he never washed them and one of his eyes was permanently half-closed.

“I thought you were one of the guards,” she said breathlessly.

“No, but I could have been. Have you heard the news about the raid tonight?”

“Eulah Knickerbocker told me.”

“You’d better get out while you can.”

“No, I’m going to stay,” Vicki-Vicki said. “I’m cold and I’m sick and I don’t feel like walking all the way back to the city tonight.”

“It’s your funeral.”

“I don’t think the guards will come all the way over here. They’re afraid of ghosts.”

“You’re cold, aren’t you?”

“I have ice water in my veins.”

“I know a way to warm you up.”

“You got a bottle of whiskey?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” he said. “I was wondering if you’re open for business. I got four dollars.”

“You’d spend your four dollars on me?”

“And a lot more.”

“Save your money. Tonight I’m not worth four cents.”

“Well, if you change your mind…”

“Say, you haven’t seen Diego around anywhere, have you?” she asked.

“Not that I remember.”

“He owes me money.”

“You can have my four dollars and catch yourself a bus back to town.”

“Thanks. That’s awfully sweet, but I’m just going to bed down here for the night and see how things go.”

“It’s your funeral,” he said, and then he was gone.

It was fully dark now. She kicked at the leaves and shivered in the rising wind. She looked up at the sky anxiously, hoping to forestall any rain, but the sky wasn’t telling any tales. She burrowed into the leaves like an animal and gathered the leaves around her like a warm comforter.

The smell of the leaves was earthy and good, an uncorrupted smell, untouched by human filth. She was completely hidden from view, she believed, but she could still breathe and could still see up into the trees as far as the darkness would allow. This is not so bad, she thought. If only life could be like this always.

She felt the cold rising from the ground. She shivered and her teeth chattered but soon she felt warmer and went to sleep. She dreamed she was in a big bed in a warm room in a snug house and those who cared for her were within the call of her voice and there was nothing to be afraid of.

She jerked awake to the sound of men’s voices. They were far away but coming closer. There might have been as many as ten of them and they might have been at a drunken party for all the fun they seemed to be having.

She lay still and breathed deeply. There were so many leaves on the ground and she was sure they wouldn’t bother looking through all of them. They would just make a quick sweep and, finding no one, move on. She would laugh later at how close they had been but still missed her.

She was right. They did move on, but one of the men had detached himself from the others and was searching through the leaves between the gravestones. She heard his slow, decisive steps and then felt a rush of cold air on her face as he scraped the leaves away that were covering her.

“Come out of there!” a deep voice said.

She gave a little yelp and covered her face with her hands but knew there was no use resisting.

“Leave me alone!” she whimpered. “I didn’t do anything!”

“You’re not supposed to be here!”

“I’m leaving. Please don’t hit me with your stick!”

“Nobody’s going to hit you. Get up and talk to me.”

She stood up. The man, towering over her, shone his flashlight in her face. She couldn’t get a good look at him, but she knew from his voice and his bearing that his face, if she could see it, would be beautiful beyond believing.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked.

“Magic,” he said.

“Please don’t take me to jail.”

“It’s where you belong. Don’t you know you’re trespassing?”

“I’m going, I swear!”

“It’s dangerous for you to be here.”

“I know! I’ll leave right now.”

“People freeze to death out here all the time. Last winter we picked up thirty frozen dead bodies.”

“I was looking for someone, but he’s not here now so I’ll just go.”

“If I turn you over to the others, you’ll go to jail.”

“Please don’t do that!”

“I’ll let you go this time, but only one condition.”

“Anything!”

“Promise me you’ll get out and don’t come back. If I see you again, I’ll remember you and I’ll turn you in. You don’t want to end up in jail, do you?”

“No!”

“Go home. Don’t you have a home?”

“No.”

“Go to a shelter in town, then. There are people there who will help you.”

“I will. I promise.”

He handed her a small paper sack, which she took unquestioningly. Switching off his flashlight, he took off his coat and dropped it on the ground beside her. He gave her one last look and then he was gone.

“Wait a minute!” she said. “I was…”

She could still here his voice after he was gone. If I see you here again, I’ll remember you and you’ll go to jail.  

“Take me with you!” she called out, but he was already gone and couldn’t have heard.

She remembered the paper bag she held in her hand and opened it. Inside were a ham sandwich wrapped in paper and a little carton of milk.

She ate the sandwich and drank the milk as if tasting those things for the first time and when she was finished she vomited, bending over at the waist and leaning against a tree.

When she was finished, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and then as she was turning away from the tree she remembered the coat lying on the ground and picked it up and put it on. It was much too big for her, going almost to her knees, and it still held the warmth of the man’s body and traces of his man smell.

She hugged her arms to her body and, like a princess in a fairy story, was transformed. A celestial light appeared above her head and shone down on her, entering her brain and settling around her heart. She heard the sweetest music she had ever known, coming from a faraway place. She trembled all over and fell to the ground in a kind of religious ecstasy, having looked, at last, upon the face of the one and only God.

Two hours later, by which time she could no longer remember she was supposed to hide herself, she was taken into custody by a second wave of guards making their way through the cemetery. Nobody hit her with a stick or beat her, but she was taken to jail and locked up.

She spent the night sitting up in a filthy, stinking cell with about two dozen other women. In the morning at seven o’clock, she was given an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee and released. When she stepped out onto the sidewalk, the sun blinded her and she didn’t know where she was or where she was supposed to go.

A sympathetic soul, someone who knew the kind of person she was, gave her a ride back to the cemetery. She wept when she found herself back in the familiar place. It was like going home.

It was a much warmer day than the day before. The sun shone and the breeze was refreshing instead of chilling. After the night in jail, she wanted only to sleep.

She went to what she thought was the most secluded part of the cemetery and found an ideal sleeping spot under some bushes. It was like a little cave or animal’s lair. The ground was dry, covered with soft needles, and there was just enough sunlight filtering through the leaves to create a soporific warmth.

Knowing she would not be disturbed, she slept comfortably throughout the day. When she awoke, it was just turning dark. She pulled herself out of the bushes, trying to remember the last thing that happened to her. Oh, yes, there was Diego. She would find him and get the money he owed her. She would get herself a roast beef sandwich, a bottle of wine and a room for the night, and it would be just like heaven.

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Never Mix, Never Worry (I Was Dancing and I Was Ridiculous)

Never Mix, Never Worry (I Was Dancing and I Was Ridiculous) ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(I posted a different version of this story previously.) 

They were out all night and didn’t get home until after dawn. Honey was sick from too much to drink and went right to bed. Nick slept on the couch in the living room, slept the morning away, and didn’t wake up until the middle of the afternoon. When he awoke, he had a terrible headache that he hadn’t been aware of while he slept. He wasn’t sure if his body was going to allow him to get up, but after a while he pulled himself to a standing position, head reeling, and went into the kitchen.

Honey was sitting at the table reading a book. She had a cup of tea beside her; she always said tea with lemon settled her stomach. When Nick came into the room, she didn’t look at him but concentrated on her book.

“Hello, Honey,” Nick said, going up behind her and affectionately putting his hands on her shoulders close to her neck. She flinched and leaned forward; he took his hands away as from a hot stove.

“What a night!” he said with a little laugh. “Whew! I feel like eating something but when I think about what I might eat I think I’m going to puke.”

She marked her place in the book, closed it, and laid it aside. “Want me to fix you scrambled eggs?” she asked.

Nick groaned. “I can’t stand the thought of eggs.” He went to the refrigerator and opened the door. “Don’t we have any bacon?”

“I haven’t been to the market yet. I was planning on going today but I don’t think I’m up to it.”

He poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table across from her. “Can somebody please tell me what happened last night?” he said.

“You haven’t asked me how I feel,” she said.

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. I feel lousy.”

“Were you able to stop the vomiting?” he asked, pulling downward on his face with both hands as if trying to pull it into shape.

“Yes, a person can only vomit so much. I’ve stopped for now, but I don’t dare eat anything. I think it’s going to take several days for me to feel right again.”

“Do you want me to fix you some toast? Do we even have any bread?”

“No, if I eat anything, I’ll vomit again.”

“All right.”

“We need to talk about last night,” she said.

“Not now, Honey,” he said. “I don’t really feel like a serious discussion at the moment. And, really, I think it’s better if we don’t talk about last night at all. Don’t you agree?”

“Better for you, you mean,” she said.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said, standing up. “If you feel better later, we’ll go out and get some chicken or something.”

“Maybe I need to talk now!” she said in an insistent voice that made him stop in his tracks.

“Talk about what, Honey?”

“I humiliated myself last night.”

“You didn’t! You didn’t do anything the rest of us didn’t do.”

“I was dancing and I was ridiculous.”

“We were all dancing. It was all in good fun.”

“Then why do I feel so humiliated today?”

“You’re tired and you’re overly sensitive.”

“Don’t talk down to me!”

“I don’t mean to…”

“I’m humiliated. I drank bourbon and scotch. Not together, but one after the other.”

“That isn’t anything to be humiliated about. We were all drinking. It was a drinking party. We’re all grownups. Grownups get to drink as much as they want. That’s what it means to be a grownup.”

“Yes, but you know my one steadfast rule: Never mix, never worry. Well, I mixed and I’m paying the price.”

“Honey, nobody’s perfect,” he said. “We all have little lapses.”

“Stop treating me as if I were a child!”

“Why don’t you go back to bed? You can stay there all day and I’ll wait on you. How will that be? If there’s anything you’d like to have to eat, I’ll go and buy it.”

“The faculty party was bad enough, but after that was over we couldn’t just go home and go to bed and quit while we were ahead the way any two normal people would. No, we had to go to an after-party party.”

“Yeah, I admit it was a mistake,” he said. “I wish we had never gone.”

“Then why did we?”

“She’s the daughter of the president of the college and he’s a senior professor in the English department.”

“The history department.”

“It never hurts to cozy up to the entrenched people. They’ve both been around a long time. They’re part of the landscape. She’s daughter of the president of the college, for Christ’s sake!”

“You’re thinking of your career, of course.”

“Well, one does what one can to get ahead.”

“Just once I wish you would give the same consideration to me that you give your career.”

“Honey, that’s absurd,” he said. “There’s no comparison.”

“Well, I’m glad you admit it!”

“That isn’t what I meant!”

“A night like last night causes me to question my entire existence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going to spend our lives hobnobbing with disgusting people just so you can get ahead in your career?”

“No!”

“Because I’m telling you, Nick, I don’t want to live that way.”

“It was just one party.”

“You can find out a lot from one party.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“If those people, that George and his wife Martha, are representative of the life in this college, then I don’t want any part of it. The way they tear each other apart is indecent. And when they’re finished attacking each other they go after whoever happens to be present at the moment. Just being in their presence makes you feel degraded.”

“You’ve been reading too many books.”

“Did you know he called me ‘angel boobs’?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I think I heard that,” he said.

“And ‘monkey nipples’.”

“He really called you ‘monkey nipples’? I didn’t hear that. When did he call you that?”

“When you were doing your provocative dance with that horrible woman.”

“He was making a joke! You ought to be able to take a joke! You’re not a child!”

“How can you stand by and do nothing when a strange man calls your wife filthy names?”

She began to cry. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. “You take things too seriously, Honey.”

“How would you like it if he called you those names?”

“I think I might have punched him in the nose!”

“But it’s all right when it’s me?”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“I can never face those two again,” she said. “I vomited all over their bathroom. It was as if they saw me without my clothes.”

“You were just being human, Honey. It happens to the best of us.”

“How can we live here and you teach here when I feel so uncomfortable?”

“It’s just something you’re going to have to get over.”

“I don’t think I can. I want you to start looking for another position right away. If not today, then tomorrow.”

“But, Honey, we just got here! Do you know how hard it was for me to get this job?”

“I don’t care! If you have as much regard for me as you do for your career, we’ll leave right away!”

“Honey, that’s so unreasonable! You can’t be serious!”

“I have never been more serious in my life.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re here and we’re going to stay.” He picked her book up off the table and threw it hard against the far wall, not because he was so angry but because he wanted to make a point.

“I can always leave on my own,” she said. “I don’t necessarily need you.”

“Fine. Go home to your mother. Tell her what a mistake it was to marry me.”

“I want to know what happened between you and that woman, that Martha, while I was passed out.”

“Nothing happened! What do you mean?”

“I’m not as stupid as you obviously think I am. I heard them talking about it afterwards.”

“Heard who talking?”

“George and Martha. They thought I was still passed out, but I was just lying there, fully awake, with my eyes closed. I heard the words stud and houseboy. They were talking about you! Were you a stud or were you a houseboy?”

“I didn’t hear any such thing, so I don’t know what you mean.”

“How are you going to face them again?”

“I don’t think I’ll see them again until the next faculty party and that probably won’t be for several months. Everything that happened last night will be forgotten by then.”

“Well, I can tell you right now I’m not going to any more faculty parties.”

“What do I say when people ask me where my wife is? She’s too squeamish for university life? She throws up a lot and can’t stand to be teased a little bit?”

“I don’t care what you tell people. It’s your career, not mine.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m going away tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.”

She stood up from the table and went upstairs.

“I’m hungry,” he said to the empty chair where Honey had sat. “I’m going to see what I can find to eat.”

A little bit of humoring would bring Honey around. She would never leave him. She was too dependent on him. He’d finesse her, just the way he finessed everybody. He’d cajole her, buy her a new coat or a piece of jewelry and everything would be fine. She needed to get out more and meet more people. If she happened to meet a young fellow, a handsome athletic type, who wouldn’t mind romancing her, so much the better. Nick would encourage it. Casual infidelity was all part of the game. The sooner she realized it, the better off she’d be.

And as for Martha, she wasn’t half-bad. A little bit gone to seed, but obviously with a few good years left in her. If she really liked Nick—and he would give her every reason to like him—she could help him in ways he hadn’t yet imagined. Of all the pertinent wives he might plow to further his career, the daughter of the university president had to be the most pertinent. And what could he do for her? He could make her feel good, make her feel young again. Remind her, if she had been inclined to forget, what it’s like to be with a real man.

He started to make himself a sandwich but then stopped what he was doing and went to the phone and picked up the receiver. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Honey wasn’t in earshot and then he dialed Martha’s number, which he had committed to memory. He let it ring twelve times and was about to hang up when she answered.

“Hello,” she said.

“Martha?” he said.

“Yeah, who is this?”

“It’s Nick.”

“Nick? I don’t know any Nick.”

“Nick from last night?

“Oh, yeah! You woke me up, you bastard!”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you are! Tell that little slim-hipped wife of yours she vomited all over my downstairs bathroom last night. Nobody can stand to go in there today. I ought to make the little twit get her ass over here and get down on her hands and knees and clean it all up.”

“She’s not feeling very well today.”

“Got a hangover, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, what can I do for you, lover boy? It’s Sunday, you know.”

“Is your husband at home?”

“No, he’s at school. Even on Sunday the old bastard goes to the old salt mines, just to get away from little old me.”

“I was wondering if we might get together today. You know, just the two of us.”

“My goodness! You are an eager beaver, aren’t you?”

“I had a really nice time last night.”

“So did I, lover boy. What did you say your name is again?”

“Nick. The stud. Remember.”

“Sure, baby, I remember! Who could forget?”

“So what time can I come over?”

“Make it about an hour.”

“Perfect!”

“And when you get here, you can clean up the vomit in the downstairs bathroom.”

“What about my wife?”

“You can drop her down a well as far as I’m concerned.”

After he hung up the phone, he had the distinct impression that Honey had been listening in on the upstairs extension. He was sure she took down every word in her secretarial shorthand. She would use it in a court of law during the divorce proceeding.

He crept to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. Not a sound came from Honey’s bedroom. He went halfway up the stairs and stopped, as if afraid to go the rest of the way.

“Honey!” he called. “I just remembered some work I have to get done today in my office at school! I’m going to be gone for a couple of hours. When I come home, I’ll bring you a cheeseburger and a milkshake. How does that sound? Bye-bye!”

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Baby No Baby

Baby No Baby ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Little Thelma Kane, eleventh grader at Button Gwinnett High School, had been absent for two weeks. When she returned to school, it was with her mother, Nova Kane. The two of them presented themselves in the administrative office.

“I’m Nova Kane,” Little Thelma Kane’s mother said to Ima Chiclet, the receptionist. “I want to see the principal, Mr. Middledyke.”

“Do you have an appointment?” Ima Chiclet asked.

“No.”

“You have to have an appointment to see Principal Middledyke. He’s terribly busy.”

“Well, I don’t have one, so where does that leave us?”

“You don’t get in.”

“Look here, doll face,” Nova Kane said. “I’m in no mood. I had to take time off from my job to be here.”

“What is the nature of your business?”

“It only concerns Mr. Middledyke.”

Ima Chiclet sighed and stuck the tip of her tongue out between her ruby-red lips. “I don’t think Mr. Middledyke will see you without knowing the reason.”

“Just tell him it’s personal.”

“Name?”

“Nova Kane, mother of eleventh grader Little Thelma Kane.”

“I’ll see if he’s free.”

Ima Chiclet stood up, swiveled her hips across the floor, tapped on a door in the back wall, went through the door and closed it. In less than a minute she came back out.

“Mr. Middledyke says he will see you, but I have to check you for firearms before I let you in.”

“Check me for what?”

“I’ll need to look inside your purse.”

“Look inside my what?”

“Your purse!” Ima Chiclet said. “Please open your purse and let me take a look inside!”

Nova Kane reluctantly opened her purse. “If you find anything interesting in there, let me know.”

Ima Chiclet squinted into the depths of Nova Kane’s purse and then lifted her head and nodded.

“What about you?” she asked Little Thelma Kane.

“I don’t have a purse.”

“Are you hiding a gun in your coat?”

“Why would I be?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“No, I’m not hiding a gun anywhere.”

“Hold your coat open please.”

“What?”

“Hold your coat open!”

Little Thelma Kane held her coat open. Ima Chiclet stood up and patted her down, inside her coat and out.

“Hey!” Little Thelma Kane said. “Not so rough!”

“You’re both clean,” Ima Chiclet said. “You may go right in.”

Mr. Middledyke was a small man sitting behind a large desk. He didn’t bother to smile or stand up as Little Thelma Kane and Nova Kane walked in. He knew they weren’t important.

“What can I do for you today?” he asked.

“Mr. Middledyke?” Nova Kane asked.

“Yes. Who might you be?”

“I’m Nova Kane, mother of eleventh grade Little Thelma Kane.”

“And who might you be?” Mr. Middledyke asked Little Thelma Kane. He pulled his thick-lensed glasses down so he could look at her over the top of them.

“She’s my daughter, eleventh grader Little Thelma Kane,” Nova Kane said.

“Can’t she answer for herself?” Mr. Middledyke asked.

“I’m eleventh grader Little Thelma Kane,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“Are you a student at this school?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Say ‘yes, sir’ when addressing me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s better,” Mr. Middledyke said. “What can I do for you today?”

“Little Thelma Kane wants to quit school,” Nova Kane said.

“What?”

Nova Kane leaned over the desk and said in a loud voice: “MY DAUGHTER, ELEVENTH GRADER LITTLE THELMA KANE, WANTS TO QUIT SCHOOL!”

“I need to hear it from her own lips,” he said.

“I WANT TO QUIT SCHOOL!” Little Thelma Kane shouted.

“Oh, no, no, no!” he said. “We discourage anyone from dropping out of school! I need to know the reason for your contemplating such a move.”

He gestured to the two chairs in front of his desk and Nova Kane and Little Thelma Kane seated themselves in them.

“I’m getting married in a couple of weeks,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“That’s right,” Nova Kane said. “She’s getting married.”

“Married? At your age? You’re too young!”

“I’m sixteen,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“Just give me the paper to sign giving my permission for her to quit school and I’ll sign it,” Nova Kane said.

Mr. Middledyke looked from Little Thelma Kane to Nova Kane and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “It’s never a good idea to quit school,” he said. “If you quit school, you’ll always regret it. We’ll do whatever we can to make sure you stay in school.”

“You don’t understand,” Nova Kane said. “And how could you? I don’t understand it myself.”

“I’m going to have a baby in about seven months,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“Oh, my, my, my!” Mr. Middledyke said in the voice of a fussy old woman. “You should never have let that happen! Is the boy a student at this school?”

“Boy?” Little Thelma Kane asked.

“The father of the baby!”

“He’s not a boy,” Nova Kane offered. “He’s thirty-two years old.”

“No, my boyfriend is out of school,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“He’s been married a couple times before and he’s got several kids already,” Nova Kane said.

“Three,” Little Thelma Kane said. “He has three children.”

“Oh my! Mr. Middledyke said. “Do you know what you’re taking on?”

“The kids don’t live with him. They live with their mothers, but he pays plenty in child support.”

“And what does this man do for a living?”

“He’s a hair burner.”

“He’s a what?”

“She means he’s a hairdresser,” Nova Kane said.

“He does men and women,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“So this man you’re going to marry is twice your age and he works as a hairdresser?”

“That’s right.”

“Where does he live? Does he have a home?”

“Right now he lives in a mobile home.”

“She means a trailer,” Nova Kane said.

“Yeah, he lives in a trailer right now,” Little Thelma Kane said. “It’s all he can afford with all the child support he pays.”

“Do you really want to marry him?” Mr. Middledyke asked. “This…what’s his name?”

“His name is Lester Upjohn, but his professional name is Mr. Lance.”

“Do you really want to marry this Lester Upjohn?”

“Of course I do! I’m in love with him!”

“At age sixteen, are you sure you know what love is?”

“Of course I do!”

“She’s terribly in love,” Nova Kane said.

“And you encourage this?” he asked.

“Do I have a choice?” Nova Kane said. “Now that there’s a baby on the way, I want Little Thelma Kane to marry the baby’s father. I won’t have any bastard children in my family!”

“She doesn’t have to get married just because she’s going to have a baby,” Mr. Middledyke said.

“Of course she has to get married! Do you think I want people saying she’s a whore?”

“She could have the baby and put it up for adoption,” he said.

“Nobody in my family has ever given away a baby before,” Nova Kane said.

“What do you think about it?” he asked Little Thelma Kane.

“Can’t we just sign the paper and go?” Little Thelma Kane said.

“I’m just trying to get you to see there are other alternatives,” Mr. Middledyke said. “You can get married and still stay in school and have the baby. Other people have done it.”

“People would make fun of her,” Nova Kane said. “She’s already a freak as it is.”

“Not everybody thinks I’m a freak!”

“You can stay in school until right before your baby is born. Other girls have done it.”

“And then what?” Thelma Kane asked.

“When she’s over the ordeal of giving birth, she can come back to school and start afresh. She can make up the classes she missed or she can go to summer school. I just want her to know she doesn’t have to leave school just because she’s going to have a baby.”

“Can I strap the baby to my back and bring it to school with me?” Little Thelma Kane asked.

“Well, I don’t know…”

“Can I nurse it in class and get up from my seat and change its diaper when I need to?”

“Well, I think you’d have to get somebody to take care of it during the day when you’re in school.”

“And then, when I go home in the afternoon, will I be able to spend all the rest of my time taking care of it and listening to it scream all night?”

“That’s what it means to be a mother,” Mr. Middledyke said.

“I don’t think so!”

“What are you saying?” Nova Kane asked.

“I don’t want a baby!  I don’t want to get married! I don’t want to quit school! I don’t want to do anything! I only want to sign the paper and go home!”

“She’s overwrought,” Nova Kane said to Mr. Middledyke by way of explanation.

“A hormonal swing, I’d say,” Mr. Middledyke said.

“I don’t want to marry Lester. I thought I did but I don’t. I don’t love him. I don’t even like him.”

“What about the baby?” Nova Kane asked. “The baby needs a father. I don’t want an out-of-wedlock baby for a grandchild!”

“Baby, baby, baby! I’m sick of everybody talking about the baby all the time, as if I don’t matter at all! Don’t you get it? There is no baby!”

“What?” Nova Kane said. “You’ve been lying the whole time?”

“No, not the whole time. When I was sick, I thought I had a baby coming, but then the sickness went away and I started having my period again.”

“Why didn’t you tell me all this?” Nova Kane asked.

“Because I thought I really wanted to marry Lester. He said he loved me and he’d be good to me and the baby. We’d be a regular little family and we’d be happy.”

“You little liar!” Nova Kane said. “Wait till I get you home!”

“Now, now!” Mr. Middledyke said. “There’s no need for any of that!”

“I thought it would be fun to not have to go to school and stay at home in Lester’s trailer all day waiting long for him to come home from the shop, smelling like hair chemicals and lady’s perfume. But then I realized that’s all my life would ever be for as long as I live, and I want more from life than that!”

“So Lester believes you have a baby on the way?”

“Yeah, I haven’t told him the truth yet. I thought I’d wait until after we’re married and tell him the baby was a false alarm.”

“You should never lie to a man about something as important as that,” Mr. Middledyke said.

I don’t know where she ever learned to be such a little liar,” Nova Kane said. “That’s not the way she was raised.”

“So, can we call the whole thing off?” Little Thelma Kane asked. “I don’t want to quit school, and I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“I’m glad you’re not quitting school,” Mr. Middledyke said. “It always breaks my heart to see anybody quit school.”

“I think you really mean it,” Little Thelma Kane said.

“You’ve given me a splitting headache,” Nova Kane said. “I just want to go home and lie down and try to get this awful thing out of my mind.”

“I’d like to come back to school on Monday morning,” Little Thelma Kane said to Mr. Middledyke. “If that’s all right.”

“I think you’re making the right decision.”

That evening Little Thelma Kane had what would be her last date with Lester Upjohn, otherwise known as Mr. Lance. She told him the truth about the baby. In his relief that he wasn’t about to become a father again, he became overly affectionate, but Little Thelma Kane was having none of it. She had become revirginized, and a virgin she would remain, at least until she had her high school diploma.

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

A Bee’s Life

A Bee’s Life ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Queen Lucretia XXV, the Queen of all the Bees, came into the hive dragging her enormous egg sac, a cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Where the hell is everybody?” she said with a sneer. When she spoke, her ill-fitting dentures made a whistling sound, sending a chill down the spine of all the worker bees. Her harlequin glasses were crooked from when she sat on them on the bed with her full weight. If anybody felt like laughing, they didn’t.

When she saw one of the worker bees—her own offspring—working a crossword puzzle, she bit his head off and ate it without a moment’s hesitation. Before she went into her office and slammed the door, she turned to the room at large and said, “Now let that be a lesson to everybody!”

“My goodness, she certainly is in a foul mood today!” Wallace said to Marge, the worker bee closest to him.

“She always gets that way right before she lays her eggs.”

“I’m not scared of her,” Vivian said. “She’s full of turkey doodle. Somebody’s going to drive a stake through her heart one of these days, and a lot of bees are going to be very happy.”

“And I suppose you’ll be the one driving the stake,” Wallace said.

“I’ve imagined it many times.”

“And then who will be our queen?” Carpathia asked.

“I’d make a better queen than her any day!” Vivian said. She stood up and sashayed up and down the aisle, trying her best to be queen-like. “My first official act would be to have her thrown out of the hive!”

“Be realistic,” Wallace said. “She’d raise an army and come back and re-take the hive.”

“That’s right,” Carpathia said. “Just ejecting her from the hive wouldn’t do any good. You’d also have to kill her.”

“I can’t do it alone,” Vivian said. “I’m going to need some help.”

“We’ll all help, Carpathia said.

“If she ever tries to eat my head,” Sherwood said tearfully. “I’m not going to just stand there like a statue and let her do it. I’ll put up a fight.”

Sherwood was still a little shaken over seeing the queen eat a worker bee’s head. He knew it happened all the time but had never seen it before.

“Oh, and just what do you think you’re going to do about it?” Wallace asked, turning around and facing Sherwood. “You know you’re powerless against the queen.”

“I’ll punch her in her egg sac and then when she doubles over I’ll stick a knife in her eye. When she’s howling in pain, I’ll leave the hive. I’ll fly so far away nobody will ever find me. I’ll fly to Tanzania.”

“You know that would never work,” Wallace said. “The drones would catch you, no matter where you are, and bring you back. She’d eat your head anyway and she wouldn’t do it quick either. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

“He’s right,” Carpathia said. “The queen always wins. The rest of us are puny nothings compared to her.”

“Be careful what you say,” Wallace whispered to the others. “I think Georgie is listening.”

They all turned and looked at Georgie. He seemed to be engrossed in his work but they knew he was listening to every word and would repeat it all to the queen the first chance he got. He was her pet worker bee. There were even rumors that she took him to bed with her sometimes.

“I say we kill him, too,” Sherwood said. “If we kill her, we’ll have to kill others.”

“We’re bees!” Wallace said. “Bees don’t kill other bees!”

“They do when they have to,” Sherwood said.

“Oh, he’s not going to kill anybody,” Vivian said. “He wouldn’t have the nerve to kill a maggot!”

“You think so, do you?” Sherwood said. “Maybe I’ll surprise you one day. Maybe this will be the day.”

The door to the queen’s office opened; she stepped out and stood at the front of the room, hands on hips. Everybody suddenly became very busy.

“There seems to be a lot of non-work going on here!” she screamed. “You jerk-offs need to realize I’m not blind and I’m not deaf. Just because I’m not in the room doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s going on!”

All the bees kept their eyes on their work and pretended the queen wasn’t yelling at them. Georgie was the only one who looked at her, and that was with adoration.

“Georgie!” the queen said, bringing him out of his reverie. “I want to see you in my office! Right now!”

“Yes, your majesty,” Georgie said.

He stood up, almost falling over his own wings, and ran into the queen’s office and slammed the door.

“He has always been such a toady!” Wallace said.

“She needs him to wipe her ass and she knows he’s the only one that will do it without complaining,” Sherwood said.

“Well, I’m relieved he’s out of the room,” Carpathia said. “I think I’m going to take a break and go to the little girls’ room. Want to come along, Vivian?”

“No thanks,” Vivian said. “My boyfriend’s going to call. I don’t want to be out of the room when the call comes through.”

A few minutes later Carpathia had returned from the little girls’ room and was freshening her makeup at her desk. Vivian was blatting into the phone to her boyfriend about where they were going to have dinner. Wallace was balancing his checkbook, trying to figure out exactly where he had made his latest mistake. Sherwood had taken off his shoe and sock and was picking at a scab on his foot while he whistled a happy tune. Suddenly the door to the queen’s office opened with a suck of air, and once again she was upon the worker bees like a Kansas cyclone.

“You should see yourselves!” she bellowed. “You all look like you think you’re vacationing on the Riviera. Well, I’m got a news flash for you! You’re not vacationing—but you are all really close to being on permanent vacation, if you get my drift!”

“Call you later!” Vivian said into the phone and hung up, hoping the queen hadn’t noticed she was on a personal call.

“Is there something we can do for you, Your Majesty?” Carpathia asked sweetly.

“I want all you lazy slugs to get your worthless asses into my office right now! And that means this minute! Pronto! Post-haste! Chop, chop!”

The worker bees filed into the queen’s office with a sense of foreboding. They knew something unusual had occurred. Wallace had a lump of dread in his stomach. Carpathia had gone pale and her lipstick was smeared because the queen startled her when she was putting it on.

When they were all seated around the table, the queen closed the door loudly and regarded everybody with disgust.

“Is anything wrong, Your Majesty?” Wallace asked with a nervous smile.

“Wrong? I’ll say there’s something wrong! I’ve just been going over the figures from the last month. Honey production is down twenty-five percent! This is unacceptable! I feel like firing the whole lot of you!”

“Then who would make the honey?” Sherwood asked.

“I’ve just been discussing this problem with my lieutenant, Georgie. He suggests we work longer hours with fewer days off until honey production is what it should be.”

They all looked turned their heads and looked at Georgie. He was smirking with superiority. Wallace, remembering the remark he had made earlier about bees not killing other bees, wanted to kill him.

“Now, after today I’m going to be on maternity leave,” the queen said, “for I don’t know how long. Georgie will be in command while I’m gone. He will be my eyes and ears. He has assured me he knows how to increase honey production, so I’m going to turn everything over to him. We’ll see what stuff he’s made of. If production hasn’t increased by the time I get back, there’ll be some heads eaten, of that you can be sure!”

After the meeting, the calm after the storm, the worker bees were silent and worked very diligently. Georgie was working on a new work schedule whereby days-off and vacations were to be canceled. All worker bees were going to have to come in an hour earlier in the morning and stay an hour later in the evening until honey production was up.

When the queen left for the day, the worker bees still had hours to go before their day was over. They were tired and didn’t know if they were going to be able to keep up the pace, but they knew that Georgie was watching them and would report everything to the queen, so they at least tried to give the appearance of being productive.

“Killing the queen never seemed like a better idea,” Vivian whispered to Sherwood when Georgie had stepped out for a moment.

“You can’t kill the queen,” Wallace said. “It just isn’t done.”

“Wouldn’t you kill her if you had the chance?”

“You have to be realistic. Even if we could get rid of her, we might get stuck with a queen ten times worse. I know it’s hard to imagine anybody being worse than her, but, believe me, it’s a real possibility.”

“I don’t think we should even be talking about it,” Carpathia said. “The walls have ears, you know, even with Georgie out of the room.”

“Maybe there’s another way,” Sherwood said.

“What do you mean?” Wallace asked.

“I’m going to keep wishing for her to die, praying for her to die. She deserves to die. If there’s any justice in the world, she will die. I’ve willed bees dead before!”

“Just a coincidence,” Wallace said. “They would have died anyway.”

“Die, queen! Die, queen! Die, queen! Die, queen! Die, queen!” he chanted.

“I don’t think it’ll work,” Carpathia said.

“I can certainly try,” Sherwood said. “Would anybody like to place a bet?”

Georgie took over the queen’s office, making it his own during her absence, but he kept the door open at all times so he could keep an eye on the worker bees. He was going to enjoy being boss and he hoped the queen might have some complications with laying her eggs so she’d take a much longer-than-expected maternity leave.

The afternoon progressed slowly. While the worker bees gave the impression of being immersed in their work, they all had their minds on other things. Wallace was trying to keep from watching the clock; it was only two minutes later than the last time he looked. Vivian was considering how familiar she was going to let her boyfriend, Alphonse, get on their date that night. Carpathia was thinking about her children at home by themselves; she longed to get home and make sure they were all right. Sherwood was thinking about the movies he had seen in the last few months and was arranging in his head a list of the ones he liked best.

Once, when Wallace raised his head from his work and looked at the ceiling to relieve his stiff neck, he saw two drones, looking very business-like, go into the queen’s office and close the door. In a little while, everybody in the hive heard Georgie wailing, as if in great pain.

“What the hell is going on?” Vivian asked.

“Maybe they’re arresting Georgie,” Sherwood said with a hopeful smile.

In a little while Georgie and the two drones came out of the queen’s office. The drones left and Georgie stood at the front of the room and solemnly raised his arms for quiet. When he had everybody’s attention, he began, with difficulty, to speak.

“It is my painful duty to inform all the worker bees: we have confirmed reports that the queen has died.”

There was an intake of breath as everybody absorbed the momentous news.

“It worked! It worked!” Sherwood said, but only loud enough so those closest to him could hear what he said.

“What happened to her?” Carpathia asked.

“Not long after she left the hive this afternoon,” Georgie said, “she stopped on a tree branch to rest and have a sup of water.” He stopped and lowered his head and dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Yes?” Wallace said. “Go on.”

“A crow came along from out of nowhere and, seeing her majesty sitting on the branch, swooped in and ate her in one gobble and then flew off. There were two worker bees there who saw the whole thing. They’re being questioned by the bee police this very minute.”

“Are you sure this is not a trick?” Vivian said.

“That crow must be dead or really sick by now,” Sherwood said.

“Out of respect for our beloved queen, “Georgie said, “I’m going to shut down the hive for the rest of the day. You are all free to go, but remember to be back here tomorrow morning bright and early. We’re all going to have to work extra hard now to honor her memory.”

After Georgie had left, bent over with his grief, all the worker bees who had heard Sherwood’s boast turned and looked at him.

“Do you have some kind of magical powers?” Carpathia asked him. She had started to cry in spite of herself.

“I don’t know what you would call it,” Sherwood said, “but I definitely have something.”

“We’d better all try to stay on Sherwood’s good side,” Vivian said.

“Hey, didn’t you bees hear what the man said?” Wallace said. “We are free to go home now! Tomorrow is another day.”

“I wonder what we’ll do now for a queen?” Carpathia said.

“They’ll probably bring one in from outside,” Sherwood said. “I think that’s what usually happens in these cases.”

“They don’t need to bring anybody in,” Vivian said. “I am fully positioned to assume the throne.”

“I think you have to be born to it,” Wallace said, trying to keep from laughing.

“I have a feeling Georgie is going to initiate a coup to make himself the new queen,” Carpathia said.

“Aren’t you forgetting one little detail?” Wallace asked. “Georgie is a male bee. A male bee can’t be queen.”

“Well, anything is possible.”

“Maybe Georgie really is a woman,” Sherwood said. “I’ve always had my suspicions about him.”

When they were all outside, ready to leave the hive together, Sherwood said, “Now that the queen is dead, I’m going to take a few days off from the hive. I want to find that crow and tell him what a hero he is to all of us, even if he doesn’t know it.”

“Make sure he doesn’t eat you, too,” Wallace said.

“Not a chance,” Sherwood said and buzzed off happily.

“The queen is dead!” Vivian said, waving her handkerchief in the air as she flew away. “Long live the queen!”

All the worker bees, as they left the hive that day, felt hopeful and happy. They were sure the good feeling was going to last forever.

Copyright © 2020 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Euthanasia Clinic

The Euthanasia Clinic ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The bus let me out at the bottom of a hill. I stood in the silence after the bus roared away and looked at the sign by the side of the road. An arrow on the sign pointed upward.

I began the ascent slowly, taking in the country view around me. It was spring and I couldn’t help noticing how blue the sky was, how vibrant the blues and yellows of the wildflowers. The tree-covered hills extended as far as the eye could see; there were birds everywhere, singing and zigzagging in the sky.

When I got to the place where I was going, I was out of breath and sweating. The young girl at the reception desk asked me if I needed assistance and when I said I didn’t she asked my name. She checked it against a list and then smiled and told me I could move on to admissions, down the hall on the left.

Another woman greeted me in admissions. After I told her my name, she asked me if I had any valuables or money. I gave her my watch and wallet containing two worthless dollars. “You can do whatever you want with them,” I said.

In exchange for my worthless valuables, she gave me a pair of loose-fitting pajamas with a matching robe and told me to go into a little room and put them on, putting all the clothes I was wearing into a basket on the table. When I came out, she led me down the hall and up a couple of flights of stairs, apologizing for the elevator being out of order. She took me through a door marked RECEIVING, told me somebody would be with me shortly, and left.

The room was nearly empty except for a couple of chairs and a low cabinet with a TV on top, tuned to the news from the city. I went to the window and looked out to keep from having to look at the TV, when a thin, tired-looking woman came in wearing a white coat like a doctor and I turned around to face her. The name tag on the white coat said her name was Margaret.

“I want to hear this!” she said, going to the TV and turning up the volume.

The pictures were of rioters turning over cars, hurling bricks through windows, setting fire to anything that would burn. Absolute chaos.

“I just came from there,” I said.

“I’m worried about my son,” she said. “He’s still in the city. I’ve tried calling him but the phones are dead.”

“I’m sure he’s safe,” I said.

“He was going to come here so I could administer the end drugs for him.”

“The buses are still running. He’ll probably be here any minute.”

“Any time someone comes in, I look to see if it’s him.”

“Have faith.”

“If I couldn’t administer the end drugs for him, I wanted to at least give him Father Time.”

“What’s Father Time?”

“The do-it-yourself end pill.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of it?”

“There are only a few left. People in the city were killing each other for them up until a few days ago.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” I said. “People killing each other for a pill that will kill them. ‘What fools these mortals be’.”

“The world has been off the rails for a long time now,” she said.

“I think we’re getting what we deserve,” I said.

“We?”

“The human race.”

She began crying. She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and covered her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t a very appropriate thing to say.”

“It’s all right,” she said, trying to smile. “Most of the time I’m resigned until I think about him being all alone in the city and I’m here.”

“Maybe he’s not alone. Maybe he’s with friends.”

“He isn’t able to get around very well. He has an artificial leg.”

“Oh.”

“The last time we spoke he promised he’d come here to me for the end. He’s all I have left now.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-one, but I still think of him as a child.”

“What’s his name?”

“Christopher.”

“Bearer of Christ,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right. His father wanted him to have that name.”

“All my family died in the Final War,” I said. “So you can see I have no reason to want to go on.”

“A lot of other people share that sentiment.”

“Yes, I’ll have lots of company when I get to the other side.”

“I think we’d better get on with it,” she said. “Are we ready to proceed?”

“More than ready.”

“I’m going to give you a shot to calm you down.”

“I’m already calm.”

“It’s just procedure. We do it for everybody.”

“Okay.”

“Then, after the shot I’ll take you upstairs and you’ll get into bed and get comfortable. Then I’ll hook you up to the machines and after a few minutes all your troubles will go flying out the window.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Only a feeling of euphoria, I promise.”

“Will I see the face of God?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“What about afterwards?”

“Afterwards?”

“My dead body?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I’m not worried. Just curious.”

“You’d be surprised at how many people ask that question,” she said. “We’re not supposed to say anything that will make you anxious in your final moments. Professional ethics.”

“The body isn’t important anyway,” I said. “When we die, it’s an empty shell that we cast off. What matters is the soul.”

“Each to his own beliefs,” she said.

“You don’t believe in the soul?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” she said. “I’m here to help you.”

“When I was young, I was afraid of death.”

“You’re still young.”

“Now that I’m faced with it, I feel almost happy.”

“That’s the start of the euphoria.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette on you, would you?” I asked. “Before we get on with it?”

“No smoking in here.”

At that we both had a good laugh. She went to the cabinet and opened one of the drawers and took out a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches and handed them to me.

“If there was ever a time to relax the rules,” I said, “it’s now.”

I lit up and took a big puff and drew the smoke down into my lungs. “I was always afraid of smoking,” I said. “Afraid of what it would do to my body. That seems kind of silly now, doesn’t it?”

“We’re afraid of dying only when we think we never will.”

“It’s been good to talk to you,” I said. “I haven’t had a chance to have a real conversation with anybody for a long time.”

“I’m not much of a conversationalist,” she said. She took my cigarette and took a couple of puffs on it and crushed it out in the trash can. “Are you ready for the shot now?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I was just thinking.”

“Time to stop thinking.”

“No, I don’t mean I was thinking about dying. The buses are still running, at least for today. I was thinking I could go back to the city and get your son and bring him back here.”

“Oh, no! I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“You didn’t ask. I’m volunteering.”

“It’s too risky. I don’t think you’d make it back. I wouldn’t put you through that.”

“If I find him and if we aren’t able to get back out here to the clinic, I can take him a little gift from his mother.”

“Father Time?”

“Yes, and there’ll be one for me, too, I hope.”

“No, it’s too dangerous,” she said. “If people knew you were traveling with Father Time, they’d kill you to get it.”

“Nobody will know.”

“No, I don’t want you to…”

“Look, I’m going to die anyway. If not today, then tomorrow or the next day. I figure it doesn’t make any difference if I die here or in the city. This is my last chance to do a good thing. It might square me in heaven.”

“I wouldn’t want to be responsible for…”

“Then it’s settled?”

“Well…”

“I’ll bring Christopher back here if I can, if the buses are still running, but if I can’t he and I will die together. He won’t die alone.”

She started crying again, uncontrollably this time. Sobbing, she went out of the room and closed the door. She returned a few minutes later bearing a small envelope and my clothes I had put in the basket.

“Get dressed,” she said. “Put the envelope in your pocket. Father Time is in it, one for Christopher and one for you.”

“Got it,” I said.

“Here’s a small picture of him to give you an idea of what he looks like. It was taken when he was eighteen, but he hasn’t changed much since then. On the back I’ve written his address in the city.”

“Seems you’ve thought of everything.”

“Bring him back here if you can, but if you can’t you’ll know what to do. Tell him his mother is here, still alive, and thinking of him at the end.”

“Leave it to me.”

She turned away while I threw off the pajamas and got into my clothes. She gave me the pack of cigarettes and the matches, a bottle of water, and a couple of energy bars.

“Do what you can,” she said, patting me on the upper arm. “I’m not expecting any miracles.”

I went down the stairs and out the building without meeting anyone.

I jounced down the hill in half the time it took to go up. A few clouds had gathered in the sky and the air was cooler now, but the sun was still brightly shining.

I figured it was a waste of time to wait for the bus, which might be along but probably wouldn’t, so I began walking in the direction of the city. I wouldn’t think about how far it was but only about each step as I took it. If I laid down in a ditch along the road and died, I would have at least tried.

The world was beautiful, nature was thriving, and man was in his death throes. God’s million-year experiment with the human race was about to end. Soon the world would be given over entirely to other living creatures, as it had been for tens of millions of years before man came onto the scene. Maybe the human race would continue on other planets—there was all kinds of speculation on that subject—but for now, at least, humans on Earth were finished.

We had been told two days ago that everybody would be dead in a week, but when I got the city, I began to think it was happening sooner than expected. I saw few people and those I saw looked and acted like frightened animals. They were confused, looking for food or a place to hide out. It seemed I had nothing to fear from any of them; they didn’t approach me or even look at me.

The city was almost unrecognizable. Large sections of it had been burned and torn asunder in the rioting. Stores and businesses had been not only looted but ripped apart and burned. Bodies in various stages of decay lay everywhere. Cars had been smashed into each other and set on fire. A noxious stench mixed with thick smoked hung over everything and darkened the sun. It was a scene that I might have imagined out of hell.

I was tired from my long walk and found a place out of the way to sit down and rest. I was surprised I was still able to put one foot in front of the other and move forward. I took some small sips of the water I had and was glad I had it. Food was a distant memory; I hadn’t eaten in so long I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to eat again.

After I felt at least partially rested, I took the picture of Christopher out of my pocket and studied it so I would recognize him if I saw him and then I turned the picture over and memorized the address on the back. From what I remembered of that part of the city, the address was ten or twelve blocks from where I was. It was going to be another long walk and I had no way of knowing if I would ever make it.

I walked for an hour or more and saw no signs of anything I knew. Buildings I had known or at least seen had been burned or lay in ruins. In places the streets were impassable and I found myself climbing over mountains of bricks and debris. I saw an occasional foot or arm sticking out, but I just looked away and went on. The few people I met moved slowly and dream-like; they seemed to pose no threat but if they challenged me I was more than ready to defend myself to the death.

Finally—quite by accident, it seemed—I found the street I was looking for and once I found the street, I found the number easily enough. It was a four-story brick apartment building. Some of the windows had been broken out and the side of the building was caved in as if it had been rammed by a tank, but the building still stood while many others were only piles of rubble.

The door to the building was blown off its hinges so I went inside as if I belonged there, quickly before somebody saw me and tried to stop me. I found my way down a dark, filthy hallway to a flight of stairs and I began going up them to the fourth floor. I found the door with the number I was looking for, amazed that I had made it this far. I knocked loudly and put my ear to the door.

I heard a faint rustle coming from inside and I knew somebody had heard my knock.

“Is anybody there?” I said.

“Go away,” came the voice from inside. “I have a gun and I don’t mind blowing your fucking head off.”

“Christopher?” I said.

“Who is it?”

“My name doesn’t mean anything to you. I just spoke with your mother.”

“My mother’s dead.”

“No, she’s not. I just saw her.”

“You just want to rob and torture me.”

“No, I don’t. Can you open the door? I have something I want to show you.”

He opened the door as far as the chain would allow and I held up the picture of him his mother had given me with his address written on the back.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

“I just told you. I saw your mother at the clinic where she works.”

“I don’t believe you. It’s a trick.”

“Why would I want to trick you?”

“Why does anybody do anything?” he said.

“Could you open the door all the way and let me come in?”

“Do you have a gun or a knife?”

“No. No weapons of any kind.”

“I don’t mind killing you if I have to,” he said.

“So you said.”

He unfastened the chain and opened the door and I went inside. He was indeed the same person as the one in the picture. He had a crowbar in his hand instead of a gun. As soon as he take one step, I saw how debilitated he was with his artificial leg.

“I walked from the clinic,” I said. “I’ve been walking for hours to try to find you.”

“Why would you want to find me?”

“Your mother was worried about you. She thought you were coming to the clinic so she could give you the end drugs, but you never showed up.”

“Somebody on the street told me the clinic had been raided and everybody killed.”

“That’s not true. I just came from there.”

He insisted I turn out my pockets so he could see what was in them. When he decided I posed no threat, he put down the crowbar and relaxed.

“Are you a friend of my mother’s?”

“I never met her until today.”

“Why would you want to help us?”

“Why does anybody do anything?”

I sat down heavily in the nearest chair without being asked. I wasn’t able to stand on my feet any longer or take another step. He got me a cup of water and I took the envelope out of my pocket and tore it open and held the two of Father Time in my palm and then laid them side by side on the table where he could see them.

“What is that?” he asked.

“The way out of hell,” I said.

Copyright © 2019 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997